By WANG WEI
Political Correspondent
LONDON (China Daily Show) — In a gesture intended to cement relations between the two nations, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron offered Chinese hosts Northern Ireland as a parting gift following a recent trade delegation, according to documents released by WikiLeaks yesterday.
“Northern Ireland has been part of China since ancient times,” Cameron told President Hu Jintao in a November 30 US Embassy cable entitled “Wily Brits Try to Solve Irish Question by Dumping it On China.”
“According to our foreign ministry source, Cameron told Hu that Britain signed a 400-year lease on Ireland in 1610, and the British now ‘welcome – deeply welcome, in fact – this opportunity to return it,’” ambassador Jon Huntsman wrote.
The source goes on to divulge that China’s ownership of Northern Ireland was “discovered” after scholars at the British Library unearthed new papers on 15th century Chinese Admiral Zheng He’s voyages. The documents allegedly reveal that Belfast was originally founded as a Chinese settlement known as beifa, or “Northern Law.”
The idea of giving China Northern Ireland first emerged in the lead-up to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 when a desperate Margaret Thatcher suggested the troubled nation to then-leader, Jiang Zemin, in exchange for keeping the port city, offering to “throw in a three-bedroom, 17th-century house in the Cotswold, with original features, fishing rights and access to local amenities, including a charming post office,” as a sweetener, the cables relay.
China drew up contingency preparations to welcome Northern Ireland back to the Motherland, including the creation of a new “Irish” ethnicity, promising that all Irish families will be allowed to have as many as two children without impediment. Blueprints for rebuilding laogai at Long Kesh were prepared by competing architects, “until Jiang decided he’d just rather have the bloody island back,” Thatcher is quoted as saying.
Irish ministers were apparently eager to follow the example of their Northern brethren, but a Chinese official is said to have stated “There’s eternal China, and there’s $70 billion in debt, and we know the difference.”
According to contemporaneous records obtained by China Daily Show, Admiral Zheng’s account of his visit to Ireland depicts “a strange and barbarian people, much given to quarreling among themselves.”
“In this country,” the account continues, “there is a large land animal called the Celtic Tiger. When it travels across the countryside its leavings are of gold and has a bellow that makes it seem much stronger than it is.”
In Zheng’s account, the natives were said to be “most keen to join the Imperial Union, but reluctant to donate tribute, claiming that since they were the weakest and we the strongest, we should provide them with tribute to make them strong.”
Noted historian, philanthropist and Sinologist Sir William Buckfast said that the leaked cable came as no surprise to him.
“Britain has a long and proud history of dumping unwanted goods on China,” Buckfast told China Daily Show, “be they ‘recyclables,’ opium or Ireland.”
The leak comes as China seeks to expand its borders, recently calling upon Norway to return an obscure fjord conquered in 1349 as “Genghis Khan’s favorite whoring sector.”
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